Environmentalism as nostalgia
This piece will probably be up for about 5 more days, but it ties in nicely with what I posted below. A piece by a former environmental reporter for the Toronto Star, David Israelson opines about the older generation of environmentalists' obsession with the heyday of the environmental movement and less with our current situations.
While he's a bit optimistic that the new generation of environmentalists being less shy about working with business, he wants the whole movement to get up from looking through the photo albums of past successes and get back to working for the future. As he says,
"The environmental movement needs to be less excited about being invited into the room and more interested in what they're bringing away."
See, I'm not the only one cracking the whip here...
2 comments:
I remember being about 10 years old and getting my hands on a book for kids that was like a beginner’s guide to environmentalism. Maybe it was my young and impressionably mind, but I remember being TERRIFIED that we were going to totally destroy the planet and die a horrible death likely involving fire and I wasn’t going to make it 15. But here I am, 12 years later, and we are all still O.K.. and then things like the Tsunami and hurricanes happen and us dorky humans get our butts kicked big time. Is there really a point to being an environmentalist if nature will always rear up and deliver a nice big ass-whooping? I realize that may sound a little radical…and I consider myself a latent environmentalist…but I want to know what you think.
There's a difference between environmentalism and the issues surrounding the natural disasters. environmentalism deals with the impact that our society creates on the natural systems. The natural disasters are unfortunate events caused by the collision between complex processes and where we live.
We have no control over the natural disasters. All we can do is try to understand the processes better and minimize the risk on human communities where there is a greater chance of disaster happening. On the other hand, being an environmentalists means minimizing the degradation that our lives and actions cause in living in our society. That we do have control over.
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